Saw this; I think it needed to be part of a new thread, so have at it:https://archive.is/20250705002817/https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2025/03/teen-dating-milestone-decline/681971/Lisa A. Phillips has found herself in a strange position as of late: trying to convince her students that romantic love is worthwhile. They don’t believe in overly idealizing partnerships or in the clichés fed to them in rom-coms; some have declared that love is a concept created by the media. Phillips, a journalist who teaches a SUNY New Paltz course called “Love and Heartbreak,” responds that of course relationships aren’t all perfect passion, and we should question the tropes we’re surrounded by. But also: Those tropes began somewhere. Across cultures, people describe the experience of falling for someone in quite similar ways, “whether they grew up with a Disney-movie IV in their vein,” she told me, or “in a remote area with no media whatsoever.” The sensation is big, she tells her students; it’s overwhelming; it can feel utterly transcendent. They’re skeptical.
Maybe if Phillips had been teaching this class a decade ago, her students would already have learned some of this firsthand. Today, though, that’s less likely: Research indicates that the number of teens experiencing romantic relationships has dropped. In a 2023 poll from the Survey Center on American Life, 56 percent of Gen Z adults said they’d been in a romantic relationship at any point in their teen years, compared with 76 percent of Gen Xers and 78 percent of Baby Boomers. And the General Social Survey, a long-running poll of about 3,000 Americans, found in 2021 that 54 percent of participants ages 18 to 34 reported not having a “steady” partner; in 2004, only 33 percent said the same.
As I’ve written, a whole lot of American adults are withdrawing from romance—not just young people. But the trend seems to be especially pronounced for Gen Z, or people born roughly between 1997 and 2012. Of course, you can grow into a perfectly mature and healthy adult without ever having had a romantic relationship; some research even suggests you might be better off that way. In the aggregate, though, this shift could be concerning: a sign, researchers told me, of a generation struggling with vulnerability. A first love, for so many, has been a milestone on the path to adulthood—a challenging, thrilling, world-expanding experience that can help people understand who they are and whom they’re looking for. What’s lost if that rite of passage disappears?